The definite story ends in the warm light outside Lummidge's Private and
Family Hotel. One sees that bright solitude of the Leas stretching white
and blank--deserted as only a seaside front in the small hours can be
deserted--and all its electric light ablaze. And then the dark line of
the edge where the cliff drops down to the undercliff and sea. And
beyond, moonlit, the Channel and its incessant ships. Outside the front
of the hotel, which is one of a great array of pallid white facades,
stands this little black figure of a hall-porter, staring stupidly into
the warm and luminous mystery of the night that has swallowed Sea Lady
and Chatteris together. And he is the sole living thing in the picture.
There is a little shelter set in the brow of the Leas, wherein, during
the winter season, a string band plays. Close by there are steps that go
down precipitously to the lower road below. Down these it must have been
they went together, hastening downward out of this life of ours to
unknown and inconceivable things. So it is I seem to see them, and
surely though he was not in a laughing mood, there was now no doubt nor
resignation in his face. Assuredly now he had found himself, for a time
at least he was sure of himself, and that at least cannot be misery,
though it lead straight through a few swift strides to death.
They went down through the soft moonlight, tall and white and splendid,
interlocked, with his arms about her, his brow to her white shoulder and
her hair about his face. And she, I suppose, smiled above him and
caressed him and whispered to him. For a moment they must have glowed
under the warm light of the lamp that is half-way down the steps there,
and then the shadows closed about them. He must have crossed the road
with her, through the laced moonlight of the tree shadows, and through
the shrubs and bushes of the undercliff, into the shadeless moon glare
of the beach. There was no one to see that last descent, to tell whether
for a moment he looked back before he waded into the phosphorescence,
and for a little swam with her, and presently swam no longer, and so was
no more to be seen by any one in this gray world of men.
Did he look back, I wonder? They swam together for a little while, the
man and the sea goddess who had come for him, with the sky above them
and the water about them all, warmly filled with the moonlight and set
with shining stars. It was no time for him to think of truth, nor of the
honest duties he had left behind him, as they swam together into the
unknown. And of the end I can only guess and dream. Did there come a
sudden horror upon him at the last, a sudden perception of infinite
error, and was he drawn down, swiftly and terribly, a bubbling
repentance, into those unknown deeps? Or was she tender and wonderful to
the last, and did she wrap her arms about him and draw him down, down
until the soft waters closed above him into a gentle ecstasy of death?
Into these things we cannot pry or follow, and on the margin of the
softly breathing water the story of Chatteris must end. For the
tailpiece to that, let us put that policeman who in the small hours
before dawn came upon the wrap the Sea Lady had been wearing just as
the tide overtook it. It was not the sort of garment low people
sometimes throw away--it was a soft and costly wrap. I seem to see him
perplexed and dubious, wrap in charge over his arm and lantern in hand,
scanning first the white beach and black bushes behind him and then
staring out to sea. It was the inexplicable abandonment of a thoroughly
comfortable and desirable thing.
"What were people up to?" one figures him asking, this simple citizen of
a plain and observed world. "What do such things mean?
"To throw away such an excellent wrap...!"
In all the southward heaven there were only a planet and the sinking
moon, and from his feet a path of quivering light must have started and
run up to the extreme dark edge before him of the sky. Ever and again
the darkness east and west of that glory would be lit by a momentary
gleam of phosphorescence; and far out the lights of ships were shining
bright and yellow. Across its shimmer a black fishing smack was gliding
out of mystery into mystery. Dungeness shone from the west a pin-point
of red light, and in the east the tireless glare of that great beacon on
Gris-nez wheeled athwart the sky and vanished and came again.
I picture the interrogation of his lantern going out for a little way, a
stain of faint pink curiosity upon the mysterious vast serenity of
night.